"Never missed a day of work"

[sasha_feather]

Today I read an obituary which said, despite the person's chronic disease, "he rarely missed a day of work."

As someone who has often called in sick, I'm always bothered by this common phrase; it praises people who put work before health. Not just their own health, but the health of others: coming to work while having a communicable illness puts others at risk too.

This phrase serves to enforce our place in a capitalist, production-oriented society, where work is the most important thing, and health and rest are distant followers. Workers are granted sick days, but to take them is some sort of indulgence rather than a necessary part of being a human being with a body. We also forget that sick days are something that unions have fought for.

Because I'm always sick to some degree, I often struggle with deciding whether I am sick "enough" to call in, sick "enough" to stay home and rest. Typically I will feel guilty if I call in sick, even though my body demands rest. Having a chronic illness means that I need much more rest than the average person, and something like a migraine or cold will add to my need for rest. Language valorizing people who don't call in, ever, doesn't help to alleviate my guilt.

As I saw someone say on twitter: self care is a radical political act.

Comments

[some_stars]

This post is wonderful and articulate and true. I'm hanging on to it for when I need to argue with people (or just reassure myself).

[owlectomy]

I had this conversation at work a while ago when someone got an award for graduating from high school without ever having missed a single day of school, as if that was an awesomely praiseworthy thing -- as if the person who never gets the flu, or goes to school even when they're nauseous and barely conscious, is better than the person who gets the flu and stays in bed.

I wish that more people would realize that doing good and productive work is not the same thing as complying with the demands of an arbitrary and rigid system -- and also, that doing good and productive work is not the only measure of a life well lived. (How do I measure the day when I broke my ankle and stayed in bed reading Dostoevsky against the days when I went to class and took lecture notes and did not learn half as much as I did from The Brothers Karamazov?)

[jesse_the_k]

So true and phrased so well!

When I was working, I found it helpful to track the hours when I wasn't working as well as the superproductive hours when I was sparking. They balanced out for 15 years.

Sunny Taylor explores why she's glad she doesn't work in the Marxist journal, Monthly Review: The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability, March 2004.

[thingswithwings]

yes, this. this exactly. goddamn "protestant work ethic."

[holyoutlaw]

You articulate things I've tried to say about this. I've heard it called "presenteeism," coming in when you should have stayed home.

[derryderrydown]

You put that into words so much better than I could. (Which sucks when it comes to explaining my sickness levels to my manager.)

[wintercreek]

Yes, this. And like owlectomy said, this starts in school. I remember "perfect attendance" awards being given out in middle school, and I bet they were given out in elementary school as well. I wonder if this is another of the troubling legacies of the industrial revolution - if school is a tool for conditioning children to be "good workers" when they grow up by teaching them punctuality, obedience to schedules set by others (and communicated by bells!), spending a set number of hours in the "workplace" regardless of workload, etc, then conditioning attendance at all cost fits right in.

Amazing how deeply this stuff gets ingrained in us, and how hard it is to root out even when we know that it makes no sense.

SO RIGHT.

[laurashapiro]

I am gonna link the hell out of this, unless you tell me not to.

[kalmn]

I had a bad run in recently with "you're sitting down when your coworkers are standing; you must not be working." Hello- my work that day involved yelling. Seriously. Yelling. I can and did yell while sitting down.

[anatsuno]

This is so, so true. ♥

[isagel]

TRUTH. My workplace recently became part of a larger company that runs many places like ours. We were at their yearly conference/party last month and there were awards given out for best this and best that, and also there was one for workplace with lowest employee absence rate. And that just seriously pissed me off. So much hate for the values underlying such things.

[sophinisba]

Yay, thanks, this is such a good post. <3

[j00j]

Word.

[shehasathree]

ugh, yes.

[susanreads]

You're so right!

People could say "... was blessed with excellent health" if that's what they mean (an odd thing to credit someone with since it's mostly not under their control, but the sort of thing people do say). If they mean "went to work whether in a fit state to be productive or not", that's a bad thing.